The present invention relates to computerized speech recognition. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and methods to remove ambiguity with respect to a speech recognition system.
Speech recognition is a technology that has a number of useful applications that allow people to interface with computing systems using their voices. These applications include: allowing a user to dictate text into a document; allowing a user to issue commands to one or more computer systems via speech; improving automated telephony systems; and many other applications. Such systems are useful in large centralized-server applications, such as computerized telephony processing systems; user interaction with desktop computing products; and even improved interaction and control of mobile computing devices.
Speech recognition is known and is being actively researched as perhaps the future of human interaction with computing devices. While speech recognition technology has progressed rapidly, it has not been perfected. Currently, speech recognition requires substantial computing resources and has not achieved 100% recognition accuracy. This is partly due to inherent ambiguities in human language, and also due, in part, to varying domains over which user speech may be applied.
In a speech recognition system supporting multiple third party applications, grammars from different applications will often accept the same speech command. Thus, there is inherent ambiguity in which application should execute the command when a user issues such a command. For example, the command “send message” may be accepted by grammars from both Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Messenger, both of which are available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. In addition to the ambiguity created by determining which application to direct a command to, there is reduced recognition accuracy when a command of a much more constrained grammar (such as would be directed to a specific application), is required to be recognized by a larger grammar such as a large vocabulary dictation grammar.
Providing a speech recognition system and methods that could facilitate the direction of user speech to specific programs and/or modules as well as attempt to recognize such speech with specifiable grammars would represent an improvement to speech recognition without adding significant complexity to the user experience.